23 Comments

What a freaking nit wit! That murderous deranged Democrat nut case would have used a bomb or a knife or a bow and arrow or whatever were guns unavailable! Cain used a stone ot murder Able! It’s not gun which kill nor spoons that make people fat (looking your way, Shea!), but insane crazy self will run riot!

Mac, Did your confessor assign as a penance reading Mark-who? The Second Sorrowful Mystery, THE Scourging At The Pillar; I Desire A Spirit Of Mortification.

It’s dishonesty/diversion/distraction.

Only in America can a liberal unsuccessfully attempt to massacre lawmakers with whom they differ and the liberals scream that conservatives need to be disarmed.

I took inventory. I have more guns than I have tightey-whiteys (you didn’t need to know that). I have as much cold steel – bayonets, K-Bar, kukri, etc. Unlike the typical liberal, I know how to use them and live to fight another day.

FWIW, Rob’s comment was deleted. Others, including those yucking it up saying the GOP deserves what it gets, the NRA!’ are left up. A sad state for a once celebrated Catholic author who helped me into the Church. Mark is quickly giving voice to the worst of the radical alt-left.

Too true, Dave G. One commentator over there asked Mark if he was comfortable with the kind of commentators and discussion he was allowing and fostering.

Mark’s reply:
“Aside from jh (who I rebuked) who do you mean? The people who are rightly saying that gun cult rhetoric is false? That health care is good? I’m not interested in Tone Policing on behalf of a Gun Cult that has the blood of more Americas on its hands since 1968 than all of our wars combined.”

I’m not interested in Tone Policing on behalf of a Gun Cult that has the blood of more Americas on its hands since 1968 than all of our wars combined.”

He manifests here three pathologies of prog-trash politics: (1) no sense of personal agency and (2) an affection for sociological nonsense in service to (3) sticking the bill for social pathology with a set of preferred bogies. In this case, hobbyists largely resident in exurbs, small towns, and the countryside (which have homicide rates around about 2 per 100,000) are held responsible for the fruits of the slum honor culture (which breeds homicide rates of 35 per 100,000). If you want to contain the social damage done by the slum honor culture, you might just…police the slums with ample manpower making use of best practices. You do that correctly, and Harlem has a homicide rate of 8.5 per 100,000 and a great many young people who might have ended up dead at 25 get to shuffle into middle age. However, it’s much more fun to cast aspersions on a gun collector in Greene County than to endorse addressing the problems Harlem has had.

After some time reading the occasional blurts of a Catholic writer who fancies himself this generation’s Dorothy Day, it occurred to me that the man hated cops, and, indeed, anyone who defends himself with force and is capable of doing so. Mark Shea talks more an more like that man. What do you figure lies behind that?

The three guys in London were dead within eight minutes of the attack and could only kill seven people for one reason: they lacked guns and were massively outgunned by cops who had them.

So does he really hate cops or not? I get the feeling he’s really in favor of some platonic ideal of a cop that all the real flesh and blood ones keep failing to live up to and it’s those he really hates.

Nah if you REALLY want to contain the problem of the slums, you get fathers back into the homes.

To which the Mayor of Philadelphia responds, “Who me? Oh, I’ll get right to it…”.

We might just do something about violent crime in the slums (successfully addressed in New York) in lieu of twiddling our thumbs for six or seven generations until some spontaneous Great Awakening causes the problem to disappear.

Nate, unfortunately inconsistency is one of Mark’s biggest problems. Part of it he’s ultimately an amateur, with no real accountability. Take those horrible days after Sandy Hook. He took a few days away from blogging – and that was certainly understood. But when he came back, it was NRA=Nazi and gun regulations now! all the way. And woe betide those who dared even think about asking him to unpack some of what he said, or critique his non-particulars. He said we must do whatever or else, and that was that. Except for some of his buddies, representing a more pro-gun rights viewpoint. Even though they were echoing some of what the rest of us were saying (and getting blasted by Mark and his more left leaning readers for doing so), Mark gave them great praise for their thoughtful questions and concerns. Because, well, they were buddies and pals. That was a key moment in my following of Mark. But then I find that those who wish to somehow compromise with the forces of modernity begin struggling in the consistency department.

Do gun regulations work? Maybe, but the facts (guys like Mark-who are allergic to the facts) tell another tale. In the past ten years, national violent crime numbers declined 50% while private gun ownership numbers (Obama was the world record gun salesman) rose by 100%.

Guys like Mark-who? climb on the broken, little bodies, and wave the bloody shirts, and throw hate at whole classes of people for the massacres.

Look! I feel horrible about 23 little children being massacred. But, it wasn’t me.

Not sure if I’m reading you right, but you appear to be saying take comfort, at least I wasn’t massacred. Which, if that’s what you’re saying, I fear is all too true. I call it the modern golden rule: do unto others as long as you don’t do unto me. Of course when it’s applied is, like most things nowadays, radically inconsistent. Take unarmed blacks shot by cops. I have no reason to think it will happen to me – not being black – and yet I”m told to care and care passionately. But terrorism? That’s when it goes back to ‘as long as terrorists kill someone else, since nothing else matters but that it directly benefits me, it’s a sacrifice I”m willing to make.’ Altogether chilling, except for how many Christians are now jumping on the bandwagon.

Re Sandy Hook: preventing a Sandy Hook massacre would require mass gun confiscation or putting armed guards with almost nothing to do in exurban elementary schools. Nancy Lanza owned four guns and was in compliance with Connecticut law. They kept in a safe in her home. He murdered his mother in order to get hold of the key to the safe and then committed suicide after he’d finished his massacre at the school. Clayton Cramer’s complaints about free-range mental patients are not readily applicable. Unlike Cramer’s brother, Adam Lanza did not have a history of violence that anyone knew about and Nancy Lanza was in the process of attempting to have her son placed in an institution. The one recent case where a deficit of custodial care for schizophrenics seems spot on as a source of trouble would be that cinema shot up in Aurora, Colo.

Trouble is, it’s a big country and any big country has a non-zero population of utter kooks you really cannot identify beforehand without a boatload of false positives.

Patheos ought to be driven into the dirt for sponsoring that blowhard windbag. Kellogg’s opened their mouths badmouthing Breitbart and it bit them in the rear end. Sponsor or peddle crap and you deserve to get clobbered in the wallet.

ESPN is spiraling down the drain by being a bunch of SJWs instead of covering sports. The NFL saw its ratings plunge because a half black talentless quarterback named Colin Kapernick refused to stand for the National Anthem. Shea knows less about being Catholic than I do but some outfit saw fit to give him a forum for his crummy writing. Patheos deserves to bite the dust and Shea needs to find honest work.

Art D. Immediately (as legislatures operate) CT and NY banned/confiscated all assault weapons. The day after the laws went into effect, approximately 800,000 CT and NTY residents were made felons. I believe the NY law (S.A.F.E. Act) specifically prohibits obtaining or maintaining statistics on compliance.

Two things in conclusion re the Hodgkinson attack: It was a quick and easy transition from “Punch a Nazi!” to “Assassinate a Republican Congressman!” This is not about guns.

What to make of these statistics? Serbia is not a particularly stable country,
but even with the high number of guns per capita, it has a markedly lower
rate of gun-related homicide than we do. In Switzerland militia training is
mandatory and reservists are encouraged to keep their government-issue
weapon (usually a Sturmgewehr 90 assault rifle) in their homes. Guns are
almost everywhere, and shooting clubs are common. That nation has about
2.5X the population of Chicago, which has very strict gun control laws.
Yet in Chicago last year there were over 450 gun-related homicides. And
in all Switzerland in 2015 (the most recent stat I could find) there were… 17.

What to make of all that? I’m sure there are many variables behind the
differences in gun homicide rates between the three countries, but it seems
clear to me that the relatively low rates of gun homicide enjoyed by both
Serbia and Switzerland, despite their high number of guns per capita, means
that our higher rate of gun violence has causes other than just the availability
of guns. People (*ahem*, Mark Shea) who harp on the need to reduce access
to guns are ignoring the actual causes of gun-related violence in this country,
whatever those actual causes might be. Shea and his ilk would do well to get
past their obsession with gun control and try to address the true causes
of our nation’s gun-related violence. (And yes, as Penguins Fan stated above,
Shea is a blowhard windbag).

We also have the fact that the most well-armed, per capita, regions of the country, invariably rural, have European levels of homicide rates. Death by homicide in this country is largely an urban problem and usually associated with drugs and gangs.

I have more guns than I have tightey-whiteys (you didn’t need to know that).

Only 20 years late to the “boxers or briefs” question….

*******
A thing to look out for on statistics– not all countries figure homicide the way we do, and age is an important consideration. Guys between the ages of 16 and 30-something are involved in most crimes. (Which makes sense– it’s really dumb for, oh, a grandma to try intimidating people in a robbery!)

The homicide rate in my hometown is bad (20 per 100,000, or 35 per 100,000 in the core of the city) with little in the way of organized gangs. A great many slum homicides are inter-personal disputes between troublesome and impetuous people. (Or, as the disreputable Mr. Sailer puts it, “the Dominican guy shoots the Puerto Rican guy in a dispute over a plate of chicken”. The social control established by amply staffed police forces (including and especially incapacitation of a smalll selection of youth) cuts way back on this. Laws requiring registration of pistols and prohibiting licenses to juveniles or people with convictions for certain offenses are a component of these efforts at social control, because you can stop and frisk and then jail people you find with unlicensed firearms. This sort of thing is remote from mass confiscation. Also keep in mind that long guns are used in only about 3% of all homicides.

You look at the Democratic Party and you figure that one-third to two-thirds vote regularly but otherwise do not pay much attention to public affairs. As for the remainder, they make their voice heard here:

Shea’s problem is that deep down, he’s still suffering from the Protestant heresy. Converts like him haven’t really completely converted to the Catholic Church, but rather a Protestant-like church with sacraments. He claims to know and accept all that the Catholic Church teaches, and that very well may be true, but that doesn’t mean he practices the faith. We should pray for the man, but also warn others that he is a danger to their soul.

Shea’s problem is that deep down, he’s still suffering from the Protestant heresy. Converts like him haven’t really completely converted to the Catholic Church, but rather a Protestant-like church with sacraments.

His problem is that he’s emotionally disturbed, and has a portfolio of stock characters from outside the Church who are his hate objects. That he was once an evangelical is perfectly irrelevant to his problem.